In my January 25 post, I looked at two tactical retirement issues: improving savings rates and evaluating portfolio risk levels. In this post, I’ll wrap up with three additional ideas.
Recent posts tagged ‘retirement’
Here are several “big picture” retirement themes I expect to hear more of in the coming year. I’ll come back later in the month with a post on personal retirement tactics.
Year-end is fast approaching, and based on web traffic it seems like the question of converting traditional IRA savings to Roth savings looms large. Congress has added to the buzz by allowing the conversion of certain pre-tax 401(k) money into Roth money (though few plans will offer this option in 2010).
Before you jump on the conversion bandwagon, I want to raise a critical question: What if tax rates don’t go up?
Coming back from lunch in our cafeteria (in keeping with Vanguard’s nautical theme, we call it the Galley), I ran into a co-worker (crew member) I’ve known since I joined Vanguard 14 years ago.
After exchanging quick updates on work and our children, he mentioned that while his kids were at one end of the “care spectrum,” his aging parents were at the other—and were occupying a lot of both his and his wife’s time and financial resources. Heading back to my office, I wondered why more isn’t said about this in the financial planning media. It’s not an unknown challenge—there are books, websites, news articles, and even a “Sandwich Generation Month.”
This blog post was written jointly by Steve Utkus and John Ameriks.
Vanguard is not an insurance company, but that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate the potential value that some see in having a guaranteed income in retirement.
In fact, you may have heard that Vanguard recently introduced Vanguard Annuity Access™, powered by the Income Solutions® platform. This is an online annuity marketplace where you can compare quotes on comparable fixed annuities from a set of leading insurers. The program is designed to facilitate easy, apples-to-apples comparisons among different annuity contracts, with the highest degree of fee transparency possible. This new service may be very helpful to those people seeking the kind of income guarantees an annuity can provide.